Brexit, climate change, culture wars and fame form a seemingly endless indulgent discourse with no real direction or purpose. While Rooney wants to make it clear that these characters are made by a complex process of personal and structural factors, the characterisation of these effects comes across as largely typical liberal nihilism: evident contemporary issues are discussed but focus by and large as background.

Needless to say she still buys her sandwich. In one particular scene Alice walks into a local supermarket and writes in an email to Eileen that it was a “culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. In an interview about her own Marxist politics, she talks about these interlinking ideas within the scope of novels, about the investigation of how “class as a very broad social structure impacts our personal and intimate lives”. Rooney has always been fascinated by how these things intertwine, how structural factors like politics and the economy can influence everyday life. By contrast, Simon, her on-and-off childhood friend-come-love interest, works in politics for an obscure left-wing group and advocates for relatively good things, he had studied Philosophy at Oxford (and for good measure is a Catholic).įrom the very set-up the premise is typical of Rooney’s previous two books: the characters’ relationships are constructed through ambivalent power-dynamics social and economic factors (class, financial background, education, religion, family history) and individual personal forces, (by and large, mistakes and miscommunication). Auden”, going to a café to read The Karamazov Brothers and moping about an ex-boyfriend, by looking at his social media with the bleak bio: “local sad boy. She works at a literary magazine formatting the full stops in “W.H. On the other hand, it’s also a novel about Eileen, Alice’s friend from Trinity College, introduced through an email correspondence with Alice. Alice has a million euros in the bank, a fraught emotional self, and has been given the use of a large old rectory belonging to an artist friend: “It’s much too big, obviously” and “they’re not charging me any rent”. From the very beginning Rooney sets up the parameters of their relationship clearly based on class: Felix rents with friends from work, living in a semi-detached house on an estate described on google maps as a “network of white streets on a grey background”.

Felix is a local who works in an Amazon-esque warehouse.

Alice Kelleher is a twenty-nine-year-old novelist who finds herself on the west-coast of Ireland following a breakdown in New York. Sally Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You starts with a tinder date in a hotel lobby bar overlooking the Atlantic.

Review of beautiful world where are you